Open library

The library

The essential reading of generative AI and agents, open in a clean reading view, with Meow and Standard summaries when available. No account needed to read.

560 papers · 558 with a Meow summary · 333 posts

The papers that shaped today’s generative AI, agent research and agent engineering, from word vectors to agentic RL.

55 of 387 in this collection. Searches titles, authors, labs, arXiv IDs and summaries.

  1. Unifying Group-Relative and Self-Distillation Policy Optimization via Sample Routing

    Gengsheng Li, Tianyu Yang, Junfeng Fang et al.

    Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly penalizes failed rollouts, lacking the token-level focus needed to efficiently address…

    arXiv 2604.02288v1Meow summaryReasoning
  2. Why Does Self-Distillation (Sometimes) Degrade the Reasoning Capability of LLMs?

    Jeonghye Kim, Xufang Luo, Minbeom Kim, Sangmook Lee, Dohyung Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang Microsoft Research KAIST SK hynix Seoul National University blog post beanie00/self-distillation-analysis

    Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading performance. We trace this degradation to the suppression of **epistemic verbaliza…

    arXiv 2603.24472v4Meow summaryReasoning
  3. FIPO: Eliciting Deep Reasoning with Future-KL Influenced Policy Optimization

    Qwen Pilot Team, Alibaba Group

    We present **Future-KL Influenced Policy Optimization (FIPO)**, a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to overcome reasoning bottlenecks in large language models. While GRPO style training scales effectively, it typically relies on outcome-based rewards (ORM) that distribute a global advantage uniformly across ev…

    arXiv 2603.19835v3Meow summaryReasoning
  4. Online Experiential Learning for Language Models

    Tianzhu Ye Li Dong

    The prevailing paradigm for improving large language models relies on offline training with human annotations or simulated environments, leaving the rich experience accumulated during real-world deployment entirely unexploited. We propose **Online Experiential Learning** (OEL), a framework that enables language models…

    arXiv 2603.16856v2Meow summaryReasoning
  5. How Far Can Unsupervised RLVR Scale LLM Training?

    Bingxiang He, Yuxin Zuo, Zeyuan Liu et al.

    Unsupervised reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (URLVR) offers a pathway to scale LLM training beyond the supervision bottleneck by deriving rewards without ground truth labels. Recent works leverage model intrinsic signals, showing promising early gains, yet their potential and limitations remain unclear.…

    arXiv 2603.08660v1Meow summaryReasoning
  6. Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains of Thought

    Chen Yueh-Han NYU, MATS Robert McCarthy UCL, MATS Bruce W. Lee UPenn, MATS He He NYU

    Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising tool for detecting misbehaviors and understanding the motivations of modern reasoning models. However, if models can control what they verbalize in their CoT, it could undermine CoT monitorability. To measure this undesirable capability — CoT controllability — we introd…

    arXiv 2603.05706v1Meow summaryReasoning
  7. Learning beyond Teacher: Generalized On-Policy Distillation with Reward Extrapolation

    Wenkai Yang, Weijie Liu, Ruobing Xie et al.

    On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher’s logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms. In this work, we first theore…

    arXiv 2602.12125v2Meow summaryReasoning
  8. Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

    Penghui Qi, Xiangxin Zhou, Zichen Liu et al.

    Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inher…

    arXiv 2602.04879v3Meow summaryReasoning
  9. Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillation

    Jonas Hübotter Frederike Lübeck Lejs Behric Anton Baumann, Marco Bagatella Daniel Marta Ido Hakimi Idan Shenfeld, Thomas Kleine Buening Carlos Guestrin Andreas Krause

    Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome reward per attempt, creating a severe credit-assignment bottleneck. Many verifiabl…

    arXiv 2601.20802v2Meow summaryReasoning
  10. Harder Is Better: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware GRPO and Multi-Aspect Question Reformulation

    Yanqi Dai, Yuxiang Ji, Xiao Zhang et al.

    Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a robust mechanism for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large models. However, we identify a systematic lack of emphasis on more challenging questions in existing methods from both algorithmic and data perspectives, despite their importance for refining u…

    arXiv 2601.20614v1Meow summaryReasoning
  11. Your Group-Relative Advantage Is Biased

    Fengkai Yang, Zherui Chen, Xiaohan Wang et al.

    Reinforcement Learning from Verifier Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a widely used approach for post-training large language models on reasoning tasks, with group-based methods such as GRPO and its variants gaining broad adoption. These methods rely on group-relative advantage estimation to avoid learned critics, yet it…

    arXiv 2601.08521v2Meow summaryReasoning
  12. RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation

    Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao, Miteto Wei et al.

    Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due to the lack of ground truth. While rubric-based evaluation offers a structured proxy for verification, existing method…

    arXiv 2601.08430v2Meow summaryReasoning
  13. PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning

    Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Daxin Jiang, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum

    We introduce Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe), a training-and-inference framework designed to overcome a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. PaCoRe departs from the traditional sequenti…

    arXiv 2601.05593v1Meow summaryReasoning
  14. GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimization

    Shih-Yang Liu¹, Xin Dong, Ximing Lu et al.

    As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines have begun incorporating multiple rewards, each capturing a distinct p…

    arXiv 2601.05242v1Meow summaryReasoning
  15. Entropy-Adaptive Fine-Tuning: Resolving Confident Conflicts to Mitigate Forgetting

    Muxi Diao, Lele Yang, Wuxuan Gong, Yutong Zhang,

    Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities. We investigate this discrepancy and identify a fundamental distributional gap:…

    arXiv 2601.02151v1Meow summaryReasoning